Larian explains how that particular Baldur's Gate 3 scene involving quite a raunchy bear came to be

Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian has shared the origins of that viral bear sex scene that helped put the already popular RPG on everyone's radar.

I'll admit, while I had been aware of Baldur's Gate 3 for a good while, for the most part I wasn't all that interested in it. Then, all of a sudden, I see people talking about this game where you can have sex with one of the game's characters while they're transformed into a bear. That particular moment really helped propel Baldur's Gate 3 to its monumental success (though I imagine it still would have done well without it), and really showed how wild and weird things can get. Now, while at Brighton's Develop conference earlier this week speaking to Eurogamer, former Larian writer Baudelaire Welch has shared just how that scene came to be, and how it wasn't originally going to be that big of a thing.

When Welch joined Larian in 2020, partway through development, a lot of work had already been done, including for companion romances, but certain characters like Halsin weren't romanceable just yet. "I don't think there were specific plans for him to be a love interest," Welch explained. At the time, the community surrounding the game evidently wanted "daddy Halsin," which Welch knew because they were included in that community. Larian took note of that, and decided to explore what that looked like.

"This is a character that everyone likes and sees as a possible love interest, let's try it out and see how it works," Welch continued. "The specifically turning into a bear thing. It was originally meant to be a gag that took place off screen in another scene that I pitched, because I didn't think that it would ever go anywhere, but then Swen [Vincke] and John [Corcoran], who's writing Halsin - as they were writing more major love scenes - were like, 'Oh, let's bring this idea forward and let's escalate it and make it a main thing for this character.'

"I have to admire that something I thought was just a gag - there's this off-stage sex scene where he turns into a bear as part of it - was taken as, 'Oh, that's really cool or funny, let's run with that.' That was a great attitude that was always there at Larian. Sometimes I would think something was too ridiculous to be done or too much of a joke, especially because so many people have to work on something in a game with cinematics and motion capture and scripting, but something that feels like 'oh this is a ridiculous little idea' did have the space to grow."

This silly little idea has really grown to take on a life of its own, as it's even led us to bear sex speedruns, so let's all thank Larian that we can say something as silly as that exists in the world.